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Thoughts: A Short Hike

shorthike_track

A Short Hike spread through my online community of friends like some sort of viral plague. The first person to buy it posted their initial impression to our Slack: “Wow, this is lovely!” Shortly afterwards a second “X now owns A Short Hike” popped up in my Steam activity feed, and the person responsible posted their initial impression: “Wow, this is lovely!”1. Things snowballed, and pretty soon the activity feed was nothing but people on my Friends list buying A Short Hike, and then gushing about it in Slack: “Wow, this is lovely!” I’m a cynical curmudgeon at the best of times and am naturally disinclined to loveliness in all of its myriad forms, and treated these descriptions with the appropriate degree of scepticism; calling something “lovely” always seemed like it was one step away from calling it “nice”, which is the word you use when you really want to damn something with faint praise. When those same people started seriously talking it up as the best game they’d played this year, though, I decided I might as well spend a few hours seeing what all the fuss was about.

So I went and bought A Short Hike. Booted it up. Started playing it.

And immediately thought: Wow. This is lovely.

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  1. I’m paraphrasing somewhat here, but the sentiment is accurate and one person used those exact words.
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